"When a reader contacts local newspaper The Crow to report a rare sighting of the Boreal or so-called 'Funeral' owl, the paper's editor Philip Dryden has a sense of foreboding. For the Funeral Owl is said to be an omen of death. It's already proving to be one of the most eventful weeks in The Crow's history. The body of a Chinese man has been discovered hanging from a cross in a churchyard in Brimstone Hill in the West Fens. The inquest into the deaths...

When Philip Dryden is informed that his father has been killed in an accident, Dryden must discover how this could be since he knew the man to have been killed in a flood years earlier, and how this might to relate to two new unexplained cases.